Now You See Me 2 review: sillier, messier and impossible to dislike

A year has passed since an implausibly famous quartet of super-magicians implausibly outfoxed the FBI, charmed the masses and set up a crooked insurance magnet (Michael Caine).

And now the remaining members of the Four Horsemen – J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) – must face their greatest challenge to date: downtime.

Having lost Henley (Isla Fisher, alas, couldn’t reprise the role as she was pregnant), Atlas is tiring of the low profile imposed by FBI agent-turned-caper-mastermind Dylan Rhodes (Ruffalo) and the unseen entity known as The Eye. Happily, shenanigans are duly orchestrated.

When the gang – rounded off by chatty, master-illusionist Lula May (Lizzy Caplan) – are dispatched to unmask a Zuckerberg-alike tech zillionaire, the act goes horribly wrong, and they all wind up in Macau, located just to the east of a Very Important Movie Market.

Enter Daniel Radcliffe, playing a second tech zillionaire. And re-enter Morgan Freeman, the rival TV cynic framed at the end of Now You See Me, now turned non-rival.

Throughout, the plotting is considerably sillier and messier than it was in the first instalment. Yet it's impossible to dislike NYSM2, a big blousy movie that is giddily in love with its own preposterousness. Without the box-office benefits of superheroes or fast cars, the 2013 original grossed $351.7 million; the new picture has already mustered $167 million in sales.

But how? Casting is crucial: the ensemble – summoned partly from the Marvelverse (Ruffalo) and The Dark Knight sequence (Freeman, Caine) – is hip, eminently likeable and makes for bouncy chemistry as they swarm and deploy into smaller, then larger factions: Franco and Harrelson are a cop buddy show waiting to happen, then Franco and Kaplan, and so on. It doesn’t hurt that these capable thesps can breathe Proper Acting into the dumbest line.

More importantly, both NYSM films display the kind of largesse, swagger and originality that recall 1980s Hollywood, a riskier business place that once pitched the movies Back to the Future and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension against each other.

Expect Scooby Doo with magic tricks and you’re sorted.